Anna Pollock

Anna Pollock

Biography

Anna Pollock, Founder of Conscious.Travel, has 45 years’ experience in tourism as an independent consultant, strategist, international speaker, and change agent having worked with the Canadian Tourism Commission, PATA, European Travel Commission, European Cities, and Tourism New Zealand. Recipient of The Visionary of the Year Award from the Canadian tourism industry, Anna also serves as Visiting Fellow at Oxford Brookes University (UK) and as an advisor to the Tourism Education Futures Initiative (TEFI).

Anna has undertaken seminal work in many aspects of tourism and is currently addressing ways of mitigating the negative impacts associated with “overtourism.” During the 1990s Anna established herself as a thought leader on the strategic implications of the Internet; created the first internet-based tourism strategy for Scotland and co-developed one of the first multi-purpose destination management systems.

Her strength is her ability to see the whole “big picture” and help others make sense of their rapidly and dramatically changing world. She even predicted the emergence of a company like Airbnb back in 2004 and was invited to speak at the annual Airbnb Summit in Paris in 2015.

Anna now focuses on models of destination development that generate higher yields with less impact based on a belief that for tourism to thrive it must be re-invented in order to provide much higher levels of satisfaction to the customer, more net benefit to the host community and sustained yields to shareholders.